A bit rich

Rosalind Riley (AP231) makes many telling points when arguing that the arts should be state funded. Unfortunately, all her arguments would apply with equal validity to hundreds of other activities asking for subsidy. Try replacing the word ‘arts’ in her article with the words ‘sports’, ‘cancer research’, ‘hospices’, ‘youth work’, ‘social housing’ (etc., etc.) and you will see what I mean. The debate is not whether the arts should receive state funding (almost everyone thinks it should), but how much and, crucially, since the arts is essentially ubiquitous and indefinable, who should actually get the cash. The advantage of fundraising is that it broadens the base of income which gives an arts organisation increased independence: the state can be every bit as capricious and interfering as a private philanthropist!
 

I am rather depressed that the debate about fundraising is now almost exclusively couched in terms of ‘philanthropy from the rich’. When I began fundraising for the arts in the late 1980s ‘fundraising’ was thought to be synonymous with ‘corporate sponsorship’, a misapprehension that cost the arts in the UK probably hundreds of millions of pounds (I have done the calculations!) in lost income from other sources – and we are in danger of repeating that error through lazy thinking. There is not enough space in this letter to go into detail, but the ‘take-away’ lesson is that ‘fundraising’ is a process of analysis of and investment in income-generation from all possible sources including legacies (pace John Nicholls’s article in the same issue), events, large-scale direct debit programmes, trust funds, telephone campaigns, volunteers, social media… the list is very long and each organisation should find its own mix – some will be successful in fundraising without ever meeting a rich person or a business sponsor.